A pilot study conducted by researchers from Stanford University’s School of Medicine reports that when autistic children worked on their social skills by using a smartphone which is paired with Google Glass, they could understand the emotions behind people’s facial expression better.
Before he took part in the study, it was extremely difficult for 9 year old Alex to make eye contact with other people. He found it to be quite overwhelming. Encouragements from his mother, Donji Cullenbine, also didn’t seem to help. When Alex used Google Glass, he actually started getting comfortable when looking at faces. “It was a game environment in which he wanted to win — he wanted to guess right — and he got an instant reward when he did”, said Cullenbine.
The findings of the therapy were published recently in the online journal npj Digital Medicine. It uses an app designed by Stanford which gives real-time suggestions about the facial expressions of people to the child wearing Google Glass- which can be linked with a smartphone through a wireless network, is designed in a way that it resembles the frame of normal glasses with a camera that can record the field of view of the person wearing it. There’s also a small screen and a speaker installed that can provide the wearer with audio and visual information.
The app identifies and names the emotions of people the children interact with, with the help of Google Glass’s speaker or screen. After one to three months of regularly using the app with Google Glass, most parents agreed that their children did start making more eye-contact and the quality of interactions also seemed to improve.
The therapy can possibly fill a major gap in autism care, there is a severe shortage of trained therapists. Sometimes children have had to wait for 18 months after they were diagnosed with autism. For the study, researchers worked with 14 families- setting the Google Glass therapy up at their homes for an average time period of 10 weeks. All of these families had a child aged 3-17 years diagnosed with autism.
Families were quite happy with the result of the study. They said that the therapy was engaging, useful and fun for their children. What really impressed parents was that the children did not express discomfort wearing the Google Glass and the device survived wear and tear.